M. Antipyrine also provides his real name on the condition that it not be published, saying that he received "heated e-mails" after the bottle appeared in the City Paper. "[S]ome of the people involved in this are a bit peculiar," he writes.
Two days later, Hobby Horse replies to the query. He has "one concern," he writes. "I need your assurance that you will not share any information you learn about my identity."
"I would like to find out more, but I'm not sure we ever will," Sgt. Susan Hatter, a state park ranger, says of the messages found inside bottles at Clopper Lake. Hatter says the works strike her more as art than crime.
(Andrea Bruce Woodall -- The Washington Post)
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Hobby Horse ignores a request for a meeting. But during an e-mail exchange last month, he sends a photograph of a hand that matches the one depicted in the postcards, providing some evidence that he is the artist.
In mid-September, Kerry Mc Aleer-Keeler, a printmaking instructor at the Corcoran College of Art and Design, scrutinizes one of the bottles. She uses similar motifs -- hands, keys, postage stamps -- in the "book art structures" she fashions.
"It's puzzling and I guess that's good, because it makes you want to know more about the piece," she says. She suggests that the hands might symbolize humanity, that the antique stamps -- most of them from Romania, some from Cuba and Taiwan -- might refer to history, that the bottle and the thread might signify containment or bondage.
She ponders the pieces of skeleton keys attached to the base of the hand, to a finger, to the outside of the bottle. "The fact that the key is broken is kind of pessimistic," she says.
And then there is how the work has been displayed. "I'm wondering if it's a joke to the artist that everyone is struggling to figure it out," she says. A "wonderful marketeer" may be behind the bottles, she adds. "It's hard for artists to find ways to show their work. Sometimes you have to get creative."
Even so, the bottle she holds in her hands has an eerie quality, McAleer-Keeler concludes. "It's definitely strange. It's definitely mysterious."
In late September, Hobby Horse's e-mailing provides a detailed explanation of the bottles: "Deciding what would go into each bottle was like designing a scene. What evidence to expose? What to hide? How to show clues with ambiguous meanings? How to display an airtight half-told tale?
"Allowing the pieces to be discovered created more possibilities for imagining the full story and/or participating in it. The finder can view me as provocateur or polluter; artist or criminal. It enabled me to find an audience that was not self-selected and introduce an artifact into a stranger's life that might seem as though it fell from a place not quite here. . . .
"When I started the work I did not try to make sense of it. But after a month or so I began to recall one of my earliest memories -- learning how to read. I know that I actually learned how to read at school but what I remember is learning how to read at church.
"For a straight year in Sunday School we had to write down a prayer during the week and read it on Sunday to the class during prayer time. I don't remember any of the prayers I wrote or read. But as I became literate that year, I do remember a feeling of unfulfillment. Perhaps I learned something else that year too.
"Anyway, maybe in some way this work is a belated attempt by an agnostic father to respond to the 52 prayers of the boy inside who still wants to believe. (Or maybe I just have too much time on my hands.)"
The postcards all bear a poem on the back of the hand, in the place where an address would appear. Each version is similar to the others and at the same time unique. In this one, abbreviations have been spelled out, missing letters filled in, and three French words translated into English:
Dreaming, he remembers
Awake, he writes the [question] on his palm
Dreaming, he read[s the] answer he holds
Awake, you [discover] his [recreated hand]
Dreaming, you find the quest[ion] he grasps
Awake, you forget.
